An Advanced Knowledge Based Graphical Authentication Framework with Guaranteed Confidentiality and Integrity

The information and security systems largely rely on passwords,which remain the fundamental part of any authentication process. The conventional authentication method based on alphanumerical username and password suffer from significant disadvantages. The graphical password-based authentication system has recently been introduced as an effective alternative. Although the graphical schemes effectively generate the passwords with better flexibility and enhanced security, the most common problem with this is the shoulder surfing attack. This paper proposes an effective 3D graphical password authentication system to overcome such drawbacks. The system is based on the selection of click points for generating passwords. The proposed work involved a training phase for evaluating the model in terms of the success rate. The overall evaluations of the model in terms of password entropy, password space, login success rates, and prediction probability in the shoulder surfing and guessing attacks proved that the model is more confidential and maintains a higher range of integrity than the other existing models

CardioCam: Leveraging Camera on Mobile Devices to Verify Users While Their Heart is Pumping

With the increasing prevalence of mobile and IoT devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets, smart-home appliances), massive private and sensitive information are stored on these devices. To prevent unauthorized access on these devices, existing user verification solutions either rely on the complexity of user-defined secrets (e.g., password) or resort to specialized biometric sensors (e.g., fingerprint reader), but the users may still suffer from various attacks, such as password theft, shoulder surfing, smudge, and forged biometrics attacks. In this paper, we propose, CardioCam, a low-cost, general, hard-to-forge user verification system leveraging the unique cardiac biometrics extracted from the readily available built-in cameras in mobile and IoT devices. We demonstrate that the unique cardiac features can be extracted from the cardiac motion patterns in fingertips, by pressing on the built-in camera. To mitigate the impacts of various ambient lighting conditions and human movements under practical scenarios, CardioCam develops a gradient-based technique to optimize the camera configuration, and dynamically selects the most sensitive pixels in a camera frame to extract reliable cardiac motion patterns. Furthermore, the morphological characteristic analysis is deployed to derive user-specific cardiac features, and a feature transformation scheme grounded on Principle Component Analysis (PCA) is developed to enhance the robustness of cardiac biometrics for effective user verification. With the prototyped system, extensive experiments involving 25 subjects are conducted to demonstrate that CardioCam can achieve effective and reliable user verification with over 99% average true positive rate (TPR) while maintaining the false positive rate (FPR) as low as 4%

Identifying Business Risk Factors of Identity Theft

Businesses are under pressure to identify and control risks affecting profitability, including the risk of fraud. Identity theft, a type of fraud, costs businesses, governments, and individuals in excess of $56 billion a year. In order to develop good internal controls to help prevent and detect fraud, it is necessary to identify the risks to the business, but business owners are not always aware of what risk factors relate to identity theft. A nonexperimental research design formed the basis of this research study. The population for this study was data from all 50 U.S. states, represented via government databases maintained by the Federal Trade Commission, the U.S. Census Bureau, and the Department of Labor from all 50 U.S. states from 2008 until 2014. The fraud triangle theory formed the theoretical framework for this study. Regression analysis determined the significance of relationships between state-specific instances of international immigration, state-specific unemployment rates, and state-specific instances of identity theft. Both state-specific instances of international immigration and state-specific unemployment rates demonstrated a significant and positive relationship with instances of identity theft. The implications for positive social change include improved understanding of risk factors for identity theft, which could lead to lower costs of operation for businesses and lower prices for consumers

Strategies Used to Mitigate Social Engineering Attacks

Cybercriminal activity performed widely through social engineering attacks is estimated to be one of the substantial challenges the world will face over the next 20 years. Cybercriminal activity is important to chief information security officers (CISOs) because these attacks represent the largest transfer of economic wealth in history and pose risks to the incentives for organizational innovation and investment and eventually become more profitable than the global trade of all major illegal drugs combined. Grounded in the balanced control theory, the purpose of this multiple case study was to explore strategies CISOs use to mitigate social engineering attacks within their organizations. Participants consisted of 6 CISOs across 6 small to medium-sized organizations that handle payment card industry data in the West Coast region of the United States of America. Data were collected from CISOs by semi structured telephone interviews. Data were analyzed through interview transcription, in-depth exploration of phenomena, data coding development, and the identification of links to themes. Three major themes emerged from the data analysis: information technology (IT) risks, security awareness, and IT strategies. A key recommendation is for CISOs to develop security awareness programs and implement technical, formal, and informal controls, to sustain operations and protect their networks from potential social engineering attacks. The implications for positive social change include the potential for (a) the mitigation of social engineering attacks, (b) the protection of both organizational and consumer data, and (c) an increase in consumer confidence resulting in increased economic prosperity

GRAPHICAL ONE-TIME PASSWORD AUTHENTICATION

Complying with a security policy often requires users to create long and complex passwords to protect their accounts. However, remembering such passwords appears difficult for many and may lead to insecure practices, such as choosing weak passwords or writing them down. One-Time Passwords (OTPs) aim to overcome such problems; however, most implemented OTP techniques require special hardware, which not only adds costs, but also raises issues regarding availability. This type of authentication mechanism is mostly adopted by online banking systems to secure their clients’ accounts. However, carrying around authentication tokens was found to be an inconvenient experience for many customers. Not only the inconvenience, but if the token was unavailable, for any reason, this would prevent customers from accessing their accounts securely. In contrast, there is the potential to use graphical passwords as an alternative authentication mechanism designed to aid memorability and ease of use. The idea of this research is to combine the usability of recognition-based and draw-based graphical passwords with the security of OTP. A new multi-level user-authentication solution known as: Graphical One-Time Password (GOTPass) was proposed and empirically evaluated in terms of usability and security aspects. The usability experiment was conducted during three separate sessions, which took place over five weeks, to assess the efficiency, effectiveness, memorability and user satisfaction of the new scheme. The results showed that users were able to easily create and enter their credentials as well as remember them over time. Eighty-one participants carried out a total of 1,302 login attempts with a 93% success rate and an average login time of 24.5 seconds. With regard to the security evaluation, the research simulated three common types of graphical password attacks (guessing, intersection, and shoulder-surfing). The participants’ task was to act as attackers to try to break into the system. The GOTPass scheme showed a high resistance capability against the attacks, as only 3.3% of the 690 total attempts succeeded in compromising the system.King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technolog

Risks and potentials of graphical and gesture-based authentication for touchscreen mobile devices

While a few years ago, mobile phones were mainly used for making phone calls and texting short messages, the functionality of mobile devices has massively grown. We are surfing the web, sending emails and we are checking our bank accounts on the go. As a consequence, these internet-enabled devices store a lot of potentially sensitive data and require enhanced protection. We argue that authentication often represents the only countermeasure to protect mobile devices from unwanted access. Knowledge-based concepts (e.g., PIN) are the most used authentication schemes on mobile devices. They serve as the main protection barrier for many users and represent the fallback solution whenever alternative mechanisms fail (e.g., fingerprint recognition). This thesis focuses on the risks and potentials of gesture-based authentication concepts that particularly exploit the touch feature of mobile devices. The contribution of our work is threefold. Firstly, the problem space of mobile authentication is explored. Secondly, the design space is systematically evaluated utilizing interactive prototypes. Finally, we provide generalized insights into the impact of specific design factors and present recommendations for the design and the evaluation of graphical gesture-based authentication mechanisms. The problem space exploration is based on four research projects that reveal important real-world issues of gesture-based authentication on mobile devices. The first part focuses on authentication behavior in the wild and shows that the mobile context makes great demands on the usability of authentication concepts. The second part explores usability features of established concepts and indicates that gesture-based approaches have several benefits in the mobile context. The third part focuses on observability and presents a prediction model for the vulnerability of a given grid-based gesture. Finally, the fourth part investigates the predictability of user-selected gesture-based secrets. The design space exploration is based on a design-oriented research approach and presents several practical solutions to existing real-world problems. The novel authentication mechanisms are implemented into working prototypes and evaluated in the lab and the field. In the first part, we discuss smudge attacks and present alternative authentication concepts that are significantly more secure against such attacks. The second part focuses on observation attacks. We illustrate how relative touch gestures can support eyes-free authentication and how they can be utilized to make traditional PIN-entry secure against observation attacks. The third part addresses the problem of predictable gesture choice and presents two concepts which nudge users to select a more diverse set of gestures. Finally, the results of the basic research and the design-oriented applied research are combined to discuss the interconnection of design space and problem space. We contribute by outlining crucial requirements for mobile authentication mechanisms and present empirically proven objectives for future designs. In addition, we illustrate a systematic goal-oriented development process and provide recommendations for the evaluation of authentication on mobile devices.Während Mobiltelefone vor einigen Jahren noch fast ausschließlich zum Telefonieren und zum SMS schreiben genutzt wurden, sind die Anwendungsmöglichkeiten von Mobilgeräten in den letzten Jahren erheblich gewachsen. Wir surfen unterwegs im Netz, senden E-Mails und überprüfen Bankkonten. In der Folge speichern moderne internetfähigen Mobilgeräte eine Vielfalt potenziell sensibler Daten und erfordern einen erhöhten Schutz. In diesem Zusammenhang stellen Authentifizierungsmethoden häufig die einzige Möglichkeit dar, um Mobilgeräte vor ungewolltem Zugriff zu schützen. Wissensbasierte Konzepte (bspw. PIN) sind die meistgenutzten Authentifizierungssysteme auf Mobilgeräten. Sie stellen für viele Nutzer den einzigen Schutzmechanismus dar und dienen als Ersatzlösung, wenn alternative Systeme (bspw. Fingerabdruckerkennung) versagen. Diese Dissertation befasst sich mit den Risiken und Potenzialen gestenbasierter Konzepte, welche insbesondere die Touch-Funktion moderner Mobilgeräte ausschöpfen. Der wissenschaftliche Beitrag dieser Arbeit ist vielschichtig. Zum einen wird der Problemraum mobiler Authentifizierung erforscht. Zum anderen wird der Gestaltungsraum anhand interaktiver Prototypen systematisch evaluiert. Schließlich stellen wir generelle Einsichten bezüglich des Einflusses bestimmter Gestaltungsaspekte dar und geben Empfehlungen für die Gestaltung und Bewertung grafischer gestenbasierter Authentifizierungsmechanismen. Die Untersuchung des Problemraums basiert auf vier Forschungsprojekten, welche praktische Probleme gestenbasierter Authentifizierung offenbaren. Der erste Teil befasst sich mit dem Authentifizierungsverhalten im Alltag und zeigt, dass der mobile Kontext hohe Ansprüche an die Benutzerfreundlichkeit eines Authentifizierungssystems stellt. Der zweite Teil beschäftigt sich mit der Benutzerfreundlichkeit etablierter Methoden und deutet darauf hin, dass gestenbasierte Konzepte vor allem im mobilen Bereich besondere Vorzüge bieten. Im dritten Teil untersuchen wir die Beobachtbarkeit gestenbasierter Eingabe und präsentieren ein Vorhersagemodell, welches die Angreifbarkeit einer gegebenen rasterbasierten Geste abschätzt. Schließlich beschäftigen wir uns mit der Erratbarkeit nutzerselektierter Gesten. Die Untersuchung des Gestaltungsraums basiert auf einem gestaltungsorientierten Forschungsansatz, welcher zu mehreren praxisgerechte Lösungen führt. Die neuartigen Authentifizierungskonzepte werden als interaktive Prototypen umgesetzt und in Labor- und Feldversuchen evaluiert. Im ersten Teil diskutieren wir Fettfingerattacken ("smudge attacks") und präsentieren alternative Authentifizierungskonzepte, welche effektiv vor diesen Angriffen schützen. Der zweite Teil beschäftigt sich mit Angriffen durch Beobachtung und verdeutlicht wie relative Gesten dazu genutzt werden können, um blickfreie Authentifizierung zu gewährleisten oder um PIN-Eingaben vor Beobachtung zu schützen. Der dritte Teil beschäftigt sich mit dem Problem der vorhersehbaren Gestenwahl und präsentiert zwei Konzepte, welche Nutzer dazu bringen verschiedenartige Gesten zu wählen. Die Ergebnisse der Grundlagenforschung und der gestaltungsorientierten angewandten Forschung werden schließlich verknüpft, um die Verzahnung von Gestaltungsraum und Problemraum zu diskutieren. Wir präsentieren wichtige Anforderungen für mobile Authentifizierungsmechanismen und erläutern empirisch nachgewiesene Zielvorgaben für zukünftige Konzepte. Zusätzlich zeigen wir einen zielgerichteten Entwicklungsprozess auf, welcher bei der Entwicklung neuartiger Konzepte helfen wird und geben Empfehlungen für die Evaluation mobiler Authentifizierungsmethoden